The use of teleconference systems in commercial and corporate settings has increased in facilitating meetings and conferences between people in remote locations, reducing the need for travel so as to bring these people physically together in order to conduct the meetings or conferences. In general, teleconference systems allow users (i.e., people) of a teleconference system, in two or more remote locations, to communicate interactively with each other via live, simultaneous two-way video streams, audio streams, or both. Some teleconference systems (such as, for example, Cisco WebEx provided by Cisco Systems, Inc. of San Jose, Calif., GoToMeeting provided by Citrix Systems, Inc. of Santa Clara, Calif., Zoom provided by Zoom Video Communications of San Jose, Calif., Google Hangouts by Alphabet Inc. of Mountain View, Calif., and Skype provided by Microsoft Corporation, of Redmond, Wash.) also allow users to exchange digital documents such as, for example, images, text, video and any others.
A limitation of some teleconference systems is that they do not allow users to experience the typical interactions that occur at live meetings when all the users are physically present at the same location. Most teleconference systems utilize remote communication devices (such as, for example, video terminals, personal computers (both desktop and portable) and mobile devices such as, for example, tablets, smartphones, etc.) that display video and play audio from the meeting, or conference, on a video display that may vary in size based on the type of communication devices or video display. As a result, the remote users of the teleconference system are typically limited to viewing the interactions of the meeting, or conference, through a “window” of the meeting, or conference, produced by the video display, which may be the screen of a mobile device, computer monitor, or large video display.
This results in a user interface that produces a fixed experience for the remote users of the teleconference system attending the meeting or conference. Generally, this user interface only allows users to see framed individuals (i.e., images of other people participating in a meeting) in a gallery experience with a lot of negative space in the user interface that is not engaging for the remote users.
Additionally, the remote users are simply monitoring camera images from fixed positions which may be located either at the location of the physical meeting, or conference, or at the location(s) of other remote users attending the meeting, or conference. Moreover, in some teleconference systems, some remote users may see multiple displays of fixed streams of video data on their video displays with very few options for allowing individual remote users to customize their views to see important or salient activity of a teleconference session.
Some systems may allow for reconfiguration of the layout of the user interface during a teleconference session. For example, one display area of a user interface may display a video stream of a user and another display area of the user interface may display a rendering of a document. One or more actions may cause the layout to change. As the layout changes, the content of one display area may be moved to another display area. When content moves from one area of a UI to another area, it can be hard for users to follow the movement. Such deficiencies of existing teleconference systems make it hard for users to decipher the intent of such movements. Such systems typically can cause the user to become unengaged or confused, which can lead to production loss and other inefficiencies.
As such, there is a need for an improved teleconference system that addresses these and other issues.